Tuesday, November 29, 2011

They were introduced in maintenance pack 4 last month but have not been given the attention they deserve: Filter Expressions. These are handy clauses that can be applied to grids. Examples are "greater than" (>), "between" (...) or even the more uncommon ones such as "does not end with" (!@) and many more. A boolean "or" can also be used to combine expressions, such as 0...100 or >200, which is "between 0 and 100 or greater than 200".

Once you have created a complex set of filter expressions for your grid, such as "All unpaid invoices in USD with a value higher than $1000 and more than 21 days overdue for customers with names starting with A to G", you may want to use Saving Views to avoid rework next time you want to apply the same filter set.

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

After the first month working on Openbravo Mobile, here´s a little update in pictures on the progress. At the bottom you will find links to a clickable mockup you can play with. Enjoy and let us know what you think.

First, we had to change our mindset from PC to mobile. My first thought was: "How is Openbravo 3 ever going to fit on a mobile device without losing the great user experience?"
Then we dedicated some weeks to analysis, sketching and playing with phones, pads and every device we could lay our hands on:

It became clear that we had to reduce the PC GUI radically and focus on the basics: Lists and contextual actions. Here´s an example of how a sales person would book an order on an iPad:

We also learned that it is important to offer actionable information. Don´t ask users to go out there and find it but bring it to them! Here´s a director reading updates about his team and commenting on an action:

Note that these are just mock-ups without any visual design or coding done yet. In this stage everything is still possible, so don't hesitate to tell us what you think via Google+, Facebook or an old-fashioned email to yours truly (rob.goris at you-know-which-company)

UPDATE: The second iteration for tablet and mobile can be found here and here.